The elderly man sat stiffly in the chair.  Outside, chores remained to be done, but they could wait for the moment.  The sun was still well up, and promised to provide sufficient daylight to continue with the task at hand.

It was difficult not to react with anger.  John C. Pemberton had spent four long years fighting against his family, and for a cause in which he and his country had lost everything.  He had been disgraced and humbled.  He spent the years after the war attempting to regain his honor and dignity -- both with his brothers, sisters, and family in Philadelphia, and the Southerners who blamed him for the loss of Vicksburg.  All he wanted was for the record to be told fairly.  And now, nearly ten years after Appomattox, General Johnston had reopened the old wound of Vicksburg.

The year was 1874, and papers covered the desk in his Warrenton, Virginia farmhouse.  A copy of Johnston's new book, Narrative of Military Operations sat in the corner.  It read more like fiction, he thought to himself.  Neat stacks of papers -- correspondence from his time as army commander in Mississippi -- occupied another corner.  As he thumbed through them, the memories rushed back.  Having just turned sixty, he knew he looked older than his years allowed.  The siege of Vicksburg had so aged him, he knew.  His little girl had scarcely recognized her father upon their reunion after the campaign closed in 1863.  He felt old and tired -- nearly too tired to battle General Johnston yet again.

It had to be done, though, he thought with resignation.  The story told in that book was so warped and twisted, that fairness to the noble soldiers who had served in his army, marched hard and endured scanty rations, and fought with such dedication had to be told.

Where to start, was the unanswered question that lingered.  He had determined not to write a history of the campaign -- that job he would leave to those General Johnston referred to as "the future historians."  No, he would simply respond with dignity to the charges made against him, and set the historical record right.  Once written and published, the public would make up its own mind as to the story they would choose to believe.

Starting at the beginning was best, he supposed -- with the charges that Johnston made against him.  Suppressing a deep sigh, and referring back to his scribbled notes, he began to write:

I may sum up Genl Johnston's charges against me under the following headings:

1st:  An exaggerated idea of the value of Vicksburg, which he says ceased to be of any importance after the passage of the gun boats.

2d:  That notwithstanding, I determined to stand a seige, the inevitable result of which was surrender.

3d:  That I failed to concentrate my troops -- on the contrary, dispersed them.

4th:  Disobedience of orders in not concentrating (for) Grant's crossing.

5th:  Disobedience in not concentrating after his (Grant's) crossing and keeping him (Johnston) in ignorance.

6th:  Disobedience in not attacking at Clinton; tardiness, refusing the orders of my superior, [refusing] the advice of council of war, [after which] I executed a movement Johnston disapproved.

7th:  Fighting at Baker's Creek without necessity and without all my forces.

8th:  That after this defeat and siege I failed to cooperate in any movement, and fixed the number of the relieving column at 40,000, which exonerated Johnston from returning with a man under it (i.e., returning with any less than 40,000 men).

What caused John Pemberton to react so strongly to Johnston's memoirs?  Joseph E. Johnston was one of the first of Confederate generals to write of the Civil War years, and his resulting book was more a justification of his military career than a chronicle of war experiences.  Johnston set the tone for what would follow in his section on Vicksburg by summarizing his thoughts about Pemberton, and it was this quote from Johnston's memoirs that so infuriated him:

Notwithstanding these advantages on his part, who, by his manner of using them, constituted himself my adversary, I should have made no comments on these publications, but should have limited my defense to the preceding narrative; because it is distasteful, even painful to me, although in self defense, to write unfavorably of a brother officer, who, no doubt, served to the best of his ability; the more so, because that officer was, at the time, severely judged by the Southern people, who, on the contrary, have always judged me with their hearts instead of their minds.

Thus wrote Johnston in his memoirs entitled Narrative of Military Operations. The "brother officer" of whom he spoke was his subordinate general during the Vicksburg campaign, Pennsylvania-born John C. Pemberton.  That Johnston determined that Pemberton constituted himself his adversary did not seem to particularly disturb Johnston, and he wrote with relish in his memoirs of the problems inherent with his command in Middle Tennessee and Mississippi.  Blame for the failures of the Vicksburg campaign, for Joseph E. Johnston, rested with two other high ranking Confederates -- his immediate superior, President Jefferson F. Davis, and his immediate subordinate, John C. Pemberton.  But, in Johnston’s eyes, blame for the loss of the key Mississippi River town, and the Father of Waters itself, could in no way be assigned to him.

Biographer Michael Ballard noted that Pemberton had intended to write his accounts of the war, but had not finished the task.  Although the work was not published, Pemberton made significant efforts to complete the work before he died in 1881.  In 1883 his widow, Pattie, sent the bulk of her late husband's papers to General Marcus Wright, who compiled the Confederate portion of the Official Records of the war.  In those papers, we surmise, was a mostly complete manuscript.  Running over 150 hand written, legal sized pages, it was unsuitable for inclusion in the records under compilation.

That manuscript turned up a couple of years ago as part of an estate sale from a portion of the Wright family at dealer near Cincinnati, Ohio. Pemberton's arguments regarding the campaign, and his interaction with Johnston, are the subject of the manuscript.  Over one hundred and fifteen years after his death, John C. Pemberton's response to Johnston can finally be told.

The defenses of Vicksburg, along with her twin defenses at Port Hudson, were the only Confederate works keeping the Union from opening the Mississippi River completely, and severing the Trans-Mississippi region from the remainder of the rebelling states.  In October 1862, John Clifford Pemberton was assigned to take charge of the Department of Mississippi and East Louisiana, a command that included the entire state of Mississippi.

Pemberton's choice by CSA President Jefferson F. Davis was a curious one, as was his recent promotion.  Upon reporting to his new command, he was outranked by both Mansfield Lovell and Earl Van Dorn as major generals.  The War Department and Confederate Senate solved this minor problem by nominating and confirming Pemberton’s rank to lieutenant general to date from October 13, 1862.

We know seemingly little today about John C. Pemberton.  Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1814, he entered West Point in 1833.  His early friends at the Point tended to have Southern roots, and he advocated Southern positions at an early age.  In 1848 he married a native of Norfolk, Virginia, and his ties to the positions of the South strengthened.

In April, 1861, Pemberton resigned his commission with the U.S. Army and joined the fledgling Confederacy, leaving behind his parents and family in Pennsylvania -- a family that would see two brothers serve in the Union army.  He received his commission as brigadier general early in the war, and was named to head the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.  In spite of the growing dissatisfaction with his bureaucratic bent towards running his department, he received promotion to major general in January 1862.

Why Jefferson Davis selected Pemberton for the Mississippi assignment is not easily understood.  Certainly the President's desire to keep those politically unfavorable to his administration away from command in key departments drove Davis, and the failures in Mississippi and Louisiana of Earl Van Dorn and Mansfield Lovell tempered his decision.  Some of the decision had to do with the desire of Davis not to give significant command to Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard.  Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, another Davis non-favorite, was still recovering from his wound suffered at Seven Pines.  Davis could hold back Johnston only for so long, and Johnston would enter the Vicksburg picture in another month -- November of 1862.

We know much more today about Joseph Eggleston Johnston than we do about John C. Pemberton.  Born in Virginia in 1807, he graduated from West Point 13th in a class of 46 in 1829. As did so many future officers during the American Civil War, he served with distinction in Mexico under Gen. Winfield Scott.  Named lieutenant colonel of the prestigious 1st Cavalry in 1855, he resigned his commission as quartermaster general (a staff position that carried the rank of brigadier general) in 1861 after the firing on Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

His prewar rank as brigadier general later became the source of bitter feuding between Johnston and Davis.  Appointed to full general to rank from July 4, 1861, he nevertheless argued vociferously that his current ranking behind three other full generals was completely inappropriate, considering his prewar rank.  This running feud with Davis affected the early Peninsula campaign, the Vicksburg campaign, and carried over into his post-war writings.

Johnston commanded eastern theater forces after the battle of First Manassas and up until his wounding at the Battle of Seven Pines.  Shelved for several months, the success of the renamed Army of Northern Virginia under the dynamic leadership of Robert E. Lee precluded Johnston's return to command of that army, so Davis looked for an assignment for Johnston.  He concluded to put him in overall command of a department that included the Confederacy west of the Blue Ridge Mountains and extended all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and to the Mississippi River.  As department head, Johnston had command over the two principal armies in the West, those of Braxton Bragg and Pemberton, as well as a small army operating in East Tennessee.

History has treated Johnston in a mixed manner.  But it is interesting to note that many contemporaries, including those extremely loyal to Robert E. Lee, thought very highly of Johnston.  Writing in late 1864, Major T.J. Goree of James Longstreet’s staff said: "It was truly a great misfortune, the removal of Genl. Johnston from the Army of Tenn.  Let his enemies say what they may, but next to Genl. Lee, he is the greatest chieftain in the Confederacy."  He was described as "a great soldier" by Edward Porter Alexander, and that "the enemy considered his marches & retreats as superlatively well planned & conducted."  Those who have read Alexander's excellent Fighting for the Confederacy know that Porter Alexander never pulled punches with his opinions of those with whom he had served.

To fully understand the Confederate experience at Vicksburg, one must understand Joseph E. Johnston and his relationship with Jefferson Davis.  Johnston never mentally accepted the assignment given him by the War Department in Richmond.  Appointed to his position on November 24, 1862, he was uncomfortable in exercising command over the armies of Generals Braxton Bragg and Pemberton.  His orders from the War Department were to "establish his headquarters at Chattanooga, or such other place as in his judgment will best secure communication and will repair in person to any part of said command, whenever his presence may for the time be necessary or desirable."  Johnston continued a running battle of words with both Davis and Pemberton during and after the war.  Pemberton's response to Johnston's memoirs is the culmination of that feud.

I noted the eight charges Pemberton felt Johnston made against him.  Pemberton summarized those charges into three major areas: 1) Pemberton was at fault for allowing Grant to obtain a foot-hold on the east side of the Mississippi River in the segment of the campaign that resulted in the battle of Port Gibson; 2) Pemberton failed to take advantage of opportunities that finally resulted in the Battle of Baker's Creek (Champion Hill); and 3) Pemberton should not have retreated into the trenches of Vicksburg and endured a siege.

General Pemberton, while he does not clearly delineate the events, or lack thereof, that caused blame for the loss of Vicksburg to be laid at his feet, rests his counter arguments on several points.  It is these points I would like to spend the rest of our time discussing.

1st:  That General Johnston, from his location in Tennessee, deliberately chose to strip the Mississippi theater of most of the available cavalry, suggesting that its loss would be more than offset by the infantry forwarded to Mississippi (generally referring to Carter Stevenson's division that was sent west).

To the student of the Vicksburg campaign, this is an assertion that is certainly not original, having been argued by Pemberton in his correspondence and official reports.  The best argument in support of this was the need to deploy infantry from Vicksburg to Jackson to guard the vital interior railroads -- the importance of which became apparent when Col. Benjamin Grierson made his famous raid through Mississippi.

On April 17, 1863, Grierson took off with 1,700 cavalry on an extended raid that started in La Grange, Tennessee, and ended on May 2, 1863 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The raid threatened the Mississippi capital of Jackson, and resulted in the destruction of over 60 miles of railroads vital to Confederate interests.  To combat these raiders, Pemberton had at best a cavalry battalion under Wirt Adams.  As a consequence, Pemberton dispatched William W. Loring's division of infantry towards Jackson to attempt to block the incoming raiders.  Grierson's movements baffled Pemberton, perhaps not surprisingly since he was trying to hound hard hitting raiders with infantry.  The last couple of days of the raid coincided with Grant's landing of his forces at Bruinsburg, and as General Pemberton notes, contributed to the fact he was restricted in his ability to concentrate his infantry against Grant's forces.

It was not like Pemberton had not tried to explain it to Johnston.  Referring to an April dispatch from Johnston, he said to his superior, "I have virtually no cavalry from Grand Gulf to Yazoo City.  While the enemy is threatening to pass (cross) the river between Vicksburg and Grand Gulf, having twelve vessels below Vicksburg."

Johnston in his memoirs dismissed Grierson's raid as a sideshow, but Pemberton determined that:  "To the people of Mississippi, to the Army, and to me, these dangerous raids were part and parcel of the "formidable invasion preparing" under our eyes but to General Johnston with as full a knowledge of the facts as they or I possessed they were simply "predatory incursions.”

These words highlight two important points central to the bickering between Johnston and Pemberton -- that first, Johnston stripped Pemberton’s Mississippi command of available cavalry, and second, that Johnston viewed the Federal raids as typified by Grierson as “predatory incursions”, not the preliminary to bigger events.  Pemberton argues, likely with some degree of hindsight, that Grierson’s raid was part of a master plan on the part of Grant -- one that he tried to warn Johnston of, but which these appropriate warnings went unheeded.  Johnston, also with hindsight, argued that Pemberton should have disregarded Grierson to only concentrate with Grant, but he too forgets that he disregarded Grant during April of 1863, lobbying Pemberton to forward reinforcements to Bragg with the hopes that Grant would remain dormant.
 
 To summarize his position with the cavalry, Pemberton concluded:

. . . on the 27th of April I once more told General Johnston that "However necessary cavalry might be to the Army of Tennessee, it was indispensable to me to keep my communications"; that "I could not defend every station on the road with Infantry" and "further" that "their raids endanger my vital position".

Continuing, Pemberton finished:

Thus it will be seen by Johnston's order I was stripped of cavalry; that I was threatened with raids and with invasion; that I informed Johnston of all this and he neither came to my help; sent me cavalry or took any step to give me aid, orders or counsel.

 Therefore, the defenders of Mississippi found themselves caught in an untenable position.  Grierson was some fifty miles to the interior of the state, wrecking vital rail links and creating havoc.  Grant was still fronting Vicksburg, threatening a landing of the eastern bank of the Mississippi.

Pemberton, therefore, felt compelled to use an entire division of infantry in support of protecting the vital railroads between the capital of Jackson and Vicksburg.  That subsequently the majority of that division found itself on the eastern side of a railroad break at the time when Pemberton needed them to concentrate at Port Gibson to contest Grant’s initial crossing was unfortunate.  Pemberton told Loring to keep his division available for movement back to the Mississippi; Loring, however, allowed himself to be caught on the wrong side of a series of railroad breaks, and never made it back in time to participate in the Battle of Port Gibson.

Pemberton concluded:

Thus, it will be seen that as far as General Johnston's refusal to permit me to have cavalry would allow, I proceeded at the earliest moment to "concentrate" and prepare to resist.

That, at least four fifths of General Loring's division, were not participants in the battle of the 1st of May [the battle of Port Gibson], is due solely to the want of cavalry, and for this General Johnston is responsible.

Thus, Pemberton blamed his lack of available cavalry on Johnston.  His final two points regarding his military misconduct are really linked together -- and we will address them as one here tonight.  They are, condensed together:

2d:  That as the Confederate force with freedom of movement once the siege had started, Johnston's efforts to communicate with Pemberton’s besieged forces was woefully inadequate.

and

3d:  That as the Confederate force with freedom of movement once the siege had started, Johnston made no real military effort to attack Grant and relieve the siege.

   Pemberton’s last two points I find particularly fascinating.  Think about the Vicksburg campaign as you know it today.  Do those two points come readily to mind?  Most likely not.  While I cannot recall for you today the sum of Pemberton's arguments on these two points, I can provide a flavor for the frustration and anger felt as the siege continued, and no relief was forthcoming.

 Following the debacle of the Battle of Big Black Bridge on May 17, 1863, and minus the division of Loring, which maneuvered itself out of the picture following the Battle of Champion Hill -- and subsequently joined Johnston near Jackson -- Pemberton fell back into the trenches of Vicksburg.  The victorious Federal troops, from their commander, Grant, on down to the private soldier, believed that one more good push against the Rebels would quickly end the campaign.  But a pair of failed, bloody assaults on May 19 and 22 quickly disabused them of this notion, and the Federal forces settled into a siege.

 Pemberton found himself on the inside, with three divisions of troops to hold the defensive line.  As initially faced by Grant, he was able to hold the lines and hold Bowen’s crack division as a mobile reserve.  As Grant extended the lines to the south, however, Bowen was forced to man enter the trenches.  Loring’s division would have been extremely useful at this point.   Grant was on the outside in a semi-circle, with obvious advantages of manpower and supplies over Pemberton.  But as the siege initially unfolded, those advantages were not pronounced, and Grant himself admitted after the war that he was very concerned about possibility of having one of his exterior points attacked by Johnston, and having Pemberton, with the luxury of moving on interior lines, come out and join the attack.  And at that early date, Grant himself was vulnerable; should his defensive circle be cut in half, he would have faced the possibility of having to have his two halves of his forces fall in opposite directions for the Mississippi.  An energetic Confederate commander would have the golden opportunity of destroying a major portion of Grant’s army before the Union forces could reassemble.

 I don’t often like to engage in counter-factual, or “what-if” speculation, but one can only wonder how a Stonewall Jackson, were he in charge of the Confederate forces near Jackson rather than Johnston, would have reacted to the opportunity facing him on May 22 after the second failed assault.  But the commander there was not Stonewall Jackson, it was Joseph Johnston.  And the story of his efforts to relieve the siege of Vicksburg, as related to us by Pemberton, is sadly one of inactivity, argument, delay, and passing of responsibility.

"It does not seem to have struck Genl Johnston then that "time was all important".  That what might be done with 40,000 Confederate troops, our combined strength on the 26th or 27th of May would probably reprise at least 50,000 to accomplish on the 6th or 7th of June and with even less success," wrote Pemberton in his manuscript.  This is a summary of a major portion of the correspondence between Johnston and Pemberton regarding how many men Johnston needed to lift the siege.  Of particular fascination, of course, is the fact that it was Johnston, on the exterior, with freedom of movement, who was harassing his subordinate for definitive statements of troop requirements for the relief of the garrison.

Writing from porch of his Warrenton, Virginia farm sometime in the late 1870s, Pemberton noted:  “Hence it is manifest that the longer inaction continued the greater must be the relieving force eventually.  It was for these reasons, far more than for any apprehension, that Vicksburg might fall by assault, that in almost every dispatch either directly or by implication, I urged upon Genl Johnston the necessity of hastening his movement."

Regarding the opportunity available to the Confederates immediately after the failed assaults on the 19th and 22d of May, he noted
[read slowly]

Here in my opinion was a more favorable opportunity than would be likely to occur again to beat the investment in the direction the most desirable(,) that it should be where, i.e., towards the enemy's new base above Vicksburg, which had been established since our evacuation of Haine's Bluff.  A force of over 40,000 men ought to have been effected thus and thereby have compelled the Federal Army to depend upon its original base at Grand Gulf for supplies, and would thus have prevented a regular siege.

 When reviewing the correspondence of this period between Johnston and Pemberton, one is struck with the difficulties attendant with the passing of messages.  For example, on the 25th of May, Johnston sent Pemberton a message in which he noted that Tennessee commander Braxton Bragg was forwarding a division, and that when it arrived, Johnston would move to Pemberton.  The message reached Pemberton on the 29th of May.  “I presumed that my reply would be received about the 3d June,” wrote Pemberton in his manuscript, and “that the division from Bragg's Army would be with him at least by that time, and that by the 7th (of June) he would be moving, in fulfillment of his promise. . . "

For the period of time between the 29th of May and the 16th of June, Pemberton received no word from Johnston on his intentions, although several of his messages were evidently received at Johnston’s headquarters.  But from the 3d of June, Pemberton’s dispatches “all urged directly or indirectly, to the extent that our relative positions permitted, the importance of an immediate movement on his part."

On the 3d of June Pemberton wrote ". . . Have not heard form you since the 29th (of May) . . . I can get no information from outside as to your position and strength, and very little in regard to the enemy . . . In what direction will you move and when?  I hope north of the Jackson Road." Johnston, by his own statement, says he sent a reply on the 7th that urged that "cooperation is absolutely necessary.  Tell us how to affect it, and by what routes to approach."  Pemberton never received this reply, and even had it arrived, he would likely have been disheartened by a commander who, with the freedom of movement, was still asking his besieged subordinate as to how, and by which routes, the siege might be lifted.

The 7th of June contains a typical dispatch from Pemberton: "I am still without information from you later than your dispatch of the 25th.  The enemy continues to entrench his position around Vicksburg . . . The same men are constantly in the trenches, but are still in good spirits expecting your approach . . . When may I expect you to move, and in what direction?  My subsistence may be put down at twenty days."

And on the 10th " . . . we are losing many officers and men.  I am waiting most anxiously to know your intentions.  Have heard nothing of you, or from you since 25 May.  Can you not send me a verbal message by a courier, crossing the river above or below Vicksburg, and swimming across again opposite Vicksburg?""

On the 12th "courier arrived this morning with caps.  No message form you . . ."  Somehow, the fact that Pemberton could send a message through the siege lines, request additional percussion caps, have Johnston send through over 100,000 caps, and yet not send a message of any sort regarding military plans to lift the siege absolutely boggles the mind.

On the 15th of June he wrote: “. . . our men have no relief, are becoming much fatigued, but are still in pretty good spirits . . . I think your movement should be made as soon as possible.   The enemy is receiving reinforcements . . ."

And on the 19th " . . . on the Grave Yard Road, the enemy's works are within twenty five feet of our redan . . . I hope you will advance with the least possible delay.  My men have been thirty four days and nights in trenches without relief, and the enemy within conversation distance.  What aid am I to expect from you?"

One clearly gets a sense of frustration and anger in these dispatches.  While transcribing the manuscript, the forthright anger comes through while retelling and explaining the tale.  While in many sections, it appears Pemberton wrote with a sense of excuse or an attempt to over his own inadequacies.  Here, however, one feels a sense that Pemberton understood that he was correct.

 At long last, messages from Johnston arrived at Pemberton's headquarters on the 21st of June.  Wrote Pemberton, “all were of the same tune, and emphatically declared, that the siege could not be raised: that all that could be attempted was to save the garrison . . . This was the nearest approach to a suggestion of instructions as to our exact cooperation which was received from Genl Johnston from the first day of the siege to its termination."

 And the arguments and counter-arguments continue.  Johnston’s memoirs would have you believe that Pemberton was fully aware in early June that there could be no relief of the garrison.  In anger, Pemberton wrote:

[the] statement [of Johnston's] conveys the impression that I was fully aware as early as the 3d of June, that Genl Johnston had no intention to attempt to raise the siege, and that all my subsequent dispatches up tot he 21st urging upon him the vital importance of hastening his movement, had reference only to the relief of the garrison, which is absolutely and unqualifiedly the reverse of the truth.

In the end, of course, we know that the garrison at Vicksburg surrendered on the 4th of July, 1863.  That was the same day that Gen. Robert E. Lee began his retreat from Gettysburg.  We also know that Joseph E. Johnston attempted little in an effort to relieve the garrison of Vicksburg, and basically allowed his troops to sit outside of Jackson, Mississippi for almost a month and a half without seriously challenging the Federal forces of U.S. Grant.

To understand the Confederate command of John C. Pemberton, one has to come to grips with the actions and decisions of his immediate superior, Joe Johnston.  The two were tied in the common bond of superior and subordinate from late November, 1862, until Pemberton’s surrender in July of 1863.  Johnston did not want the command he received from Jefferson Davis, and fought and ignored the responsibilities that went with his assignment well after the garrison had surrendered.  As a precursor to his command style of the 1864 Atlanta campaign, he generated little in the way of creative thought and dynamic action.

Johnston had several things going in his favor in the post bellum war of words.  He fired the first shot, beating both Davis and Pemberton to the publishing house.  This action is consistent with the ego of Johnston, and allowed his side of the story to be told first.  He had many friends from both armies in the immediate aftermath of the war.  In addition, Pemberton, the native Northerner, was still viewed with strong dislike by Southerners for the loss of Vicksburg.  Absent the publishing of Johnston’s memoirs, Pemberton’s tale would likely never have been told.

John Pemberton was not the ideal general for the job of managing Confederate forces in Mississippi.  His ties to the North naturally placed him in a position of distrust.  That he found U.S. Grant as his adversary was unfortunate; had Nathaniel P. Banks or John McClernand, for instance, ascended to the overall command of Federal forces, the outcome might have been different.  It is unlikely either of these two men would have engineered a campaign as original as the one performed by Grant.

Pemberton was the ideal bureaucrat, suggests his biographer.  Faced with a strategist and tactician the likes of Grant, he lacked the experience and expertise to deal with the threat.  That his immediate superior, with relief forces in the field, refused to attempt any relief, is a sad commentary on the Confederate command structure.

Could Joseph E. Johnston have lifted the siege?  Of course we'll never know, but a huge window of opportunity existed for Confederate forces as soon as Pemberton retreated into the trenches of Vicksburg.  But Johnston's insistence that the besieged provide the directions to those free of maneuver was simply a poor decision on his part, and one in which he ducked his responsibility as commander in the field.  Had Johnston managed to punch a whole in Grant's line encircling Vicksburg, it would have necessitated a falling back to his Mississippi River bases at Grand Gulf and Haine's Bluff.  Whether he could have held them, had his forces been split in two, remains conjecture.  But for lack of trying, we certainly will never know.

Johnston wrote frequently to Richmond, complaining and questioning the character and scope of his command.  The distance between the commands of Bragg and Pemberton were too distant to allow for tight coordination of events, he argued.  Johnston found it difficult to coordinate and control events in the department in which he was residing.  Simply put, his heart was not in this assignment.

What went through the mind of Johnston in late May and June of 1863?  Did he long for a military command somewhere other than Jackson, Mississippi?  Was he afraid of failure in attacking Grant?  Was this the military version of the story told by Mary Chestnut of the time when Johnston (a crack shot) went bird hunting and never fired a shot because he never had "the perfect shot", and was afraid to miss?

 During the Vicksburg campaign, Pemberton made many mistakes.  His placement into departmental command, without ever having commanded troops at the brigade, division or corps level was a mistake on the part of Jefferson Davis.  Until the Battle of Champion Hill, he had never led troops in battle himself.  To face an army like Grant's was a tall task for anyone, much less someone unused to army command.  Pemberton was better suited as an administrator, not as an army general.  He made substantial improvements in his department after taking over from Van Dorn.  The improvements, however, were immaterial once Grant crossed the Mississippi.  In addition, Pemberton did not seem to understand that once Grant crossed the river, his role was that of army commander first, and department head second.

The Vicksburg campaign was the Confederate corollary to the Union's Second Manassas campaign.  At Second Manassas, Abraham Lincoln made the unfortunate choice of bringing together George B. McClellan with John Pope to face Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and James Longstreet.  At Vicksburg, Jefferson Davis brought together Joseph E. Johnston and John C. Pemberton to combat U.S. Grant and William T. Sherman of the Army, and David Dixon Porter of the Navy.  As happened with Pope and McClellan, Johnston and Pemberton were found lacking in ability, and their paring was an unfortunate choice for the Confederacy.

 Grant could have been defeated and driven back to the Mississippi River at several points in the campaign.  Instead, on July 4, 1863, Pemberton surrendered, and the Confederacy was effectively cut in two. The slow, inevitable march, from west to east, began in earnest.  It culminated in April, 1865 when the western Federal army was within a couple of day's march of its eastern counterpart, and the war ended.  That the Confederacy failed to stop Grant at Vicksburg is not the fault of any general, as Joe Johnston would tell, but of the entire Confederate high command.  They were simply not equal to the challenge at hand.

Nothing that General Pemberton wrote in his manuscript, while written in righteous indignation, will likely change our fundamental understanding of the Vicksburg campaign.  That it may help balance our understanding of the Confederate perspective of this tragic loss to Southern arms, our understanding of history may be enhanced.

But as I was getting up at five a.m. to work on transcribing his manuscript, I could not help but feel that my mind's eye saw the General sitting in his home, writing forth his side of the story, a copy of General Johnston's memoirs on the table.  That the manuscript survives today, we should indeed be grateful.  I know that I am.

Thank you very much.